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PlayStation Home v1.3 Coming This September

Posted by Locust_Star on Aug 19, 2009 // PlayStation Home Community Manager

As announced at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, PlayStation Home’s core client will be getting a serious upgrade this fall. And when we say serious, dear readers, we’re talking excessive and impressive in quality, extent, and degree. This is the for real deal upgrade!

I got three words to start us off: Universal. Game. Launching. That’s right – you can now launch into any PlayStation 3 game directly from Home. Titles that fully support game launching (like Street Fighter IV, Resistance 2, MotorStorm, and Far Cry 2) will be identified by separate icons that appear over an avatar’s head and will have varying degrees of additional multiplayer functionality built in. Simplified game launching will take you from Home to the start menu of your favorite games with ease. Never again will you have to sign out of Home to play with (or against) your friends. Simply insert the disc of your choice while in Home and follow the on screen directions and you’ll be good to go.

Shop-a-holics will be stoked to see that an in-store item previewing option will be rolled out. This feature will allow you to preview items of clothing on your character in 3D (including the ability to check out multiple items simultaneously to see what combinations best suit your taste). You’ll be able to preview all furniture in 3D as well, complete with zoom and rotate options so you can check your potential purchases from all angles, right down to the nitty gritty. We’ll also offer you the ability to rent certain items and purchase “consumables” (limited use items) when available – such as the new Shrink Potion that lets you shrink your avatar to a tiny size. All in all, we think you’ll find that these new features allow for greater control over the use of your personal items. We’ve even added a new section to the Menu Pad under Personal > My Purchases to help you keep it all organized.

PlayStation Home v1.3 will also see additional portable objects (like the Bubble Machine) made available to the community. To start, we’ll be giving everyone free cameras that you can use to snap pictures from either a 1st or 3rd person view. These photos will automatically be saved to the Photo section of the XMB, from which you can then upload to the picture frames you have hanging in your personal spaces. We’ll be announcing more portable objects very soon, so be sure to check in on this blog often to stay abreast of the latest PlayStation Home item releases. Or just use the Latest Updates tab in your Menu Pad > Community. We here over at the PlayStation Home Community team keep an updated list of all new content releases in this area.

On the subject of portable objects, rest assured that we’ve listened to your suggestions and made some changes to help you better customize your in-world experience. You’ll be able to manually hide any portable object that you encounter, and objects placed by anyone on your Ignore or Block list will also be hidden. We think you all will find that accessing certain mini-games and watching videos will be much easier thanks to these additional options.

There are tons of little updates that you’ll notice when PlayStation Home v1.3 launches. To start, you’ll see that your avatar has additional emotes – including two new action emotes (you can flip a coin with your friends or play the old “pick a number between 1 and 100” game). You will also be able to pose your avatar in a variety of ways (photo op anyone?). We’ve also added some new categories of clothing (composite and outfits) that will allow you to customize your avatar with greater ease. In addition, we’ve optimized the targeting system, added a new queuing system, fixed quite a few pesky bugs, and are giving you the option to determine your cache size (you can choose from 3, 5, 8, and 12 GB) so as to make navigating Home a much smoother experience. As we get closer to launch, we’ll post complete patch notes for the v1.3 client on the PlayStation Home General forum at www.us.playstation.com. So if you haven’t yet signed up for our forums, please take a moment to do so now – and check in often for more details regarding what’s going on in PlayStation Home.

Last but certainly not least, we’ll be launching a SingStar space right around the time that PlayStation Home v1.3 hits your PlayStation 3s. This swanky night club-esque SingStar-themed game space is sure to be the hot new hub for all of you party goers. Whether you want to get down with your friends on the reactive dance floor, vote for your favorite music videos on the Video Jukebox, or test your knowledge at the SingStar Music Quiz, this space promises to have something for every SingStar fanatic.

347 Comments

Game launching is an welcomed addition to HOME. I would like to hear from Sony on how they are working with developers to add this function into future titles. New titles need to actively promote this function, so users are aware that it is there. It would be nice to launch multi-player PSN arcade style games from HOME. I hope smaller devs are receiving help.

WOOT!!
Man this is one Great update!
Now just give HOME its own XMB spot
Get rid of the 4 “press X to continue” pages that form the wall between my XMB and my HOME avatar.
And add Trophy Lvl Titles above our names, for a MMO touch
And HOME will be the best 3D world EVER!!

well now were gonna have pesky perverts taking random pics of girls everywhere.. i know my gf isnt going to use home anymore after tht.. owell i like the camera but its something they should take into consideration

-The Movie Theater-
Why not stream full length movies for a small fee or have ads like on TV

-Gaming Conventions-
Why not have live streaming of Sony press Conference at E3, GamesCon, and The Tokyo Gameshow. Not many of us live in these area to attent or view these events on TV.

-Unable to deliever Contents what was originally shown-
When will ever be able to stream contents from our HDD in your HOME space? That was of the major “selling” point of HOME and that has yet to materialize.
Oh and lets not forget the 3D trophy room.

The universal game launching is the best new feature! Now the only thing to really make home a place for me to be on during downtime is to be able to listen to my stored on the hdd. Any word of this being worked on? Great work guys!

I’m looking forward to this, Home has come along way since it became public. Glad to see the preview of items coming. It was a pain if you bought something only to find out the three inch picture doesn’t look as good.

@55 nspace2020
Gamers are still going to written this off. If you read carefully, you just launch the game to the main menu….Oh wow, I am going to sign into home just to do what. You will not be able to create a party to join a single multiplayer game.

I am beginning to agree with the people that are saying HOME is a waste of Sony resource because it has yet to deliver on features that was announce 2 years ago.

Glad to see the update. One concern I have is inside your personal spaces. I hope the limit of items to be placed is increased, especially in the spaces you purchased. The Log Cabin is barren with the current limit. I like putting out all the freebies I’ve won and acquired, however I have to remove furniture every time I want to put another out.

I love what the development team is doing with home, but I’m really looking forward to them fixing the picture frame problem. You should be able to put frame on any wall you want to, and not some pre-determined place. (especially in the default personal space)

I paid 3 bucks for a frame I don’t even use, because of how I have my apartment set up. (inb4changeyourapartmentaround) Anyways, keep up the good work devs.

This sounds so awesome. BUT does this also mean launching into home is more streamlined? It should be only 1 button press from being in the XMB to be moving around in a Home space.

I’m also seriously hoping the larger cache option means if i give 12gb of HDD space to Home there will be basically zero load-time between Home Spaces. Is this correct? If so, my biggest home complaints have been eradicated.

On the (very) rare occasions I’ve started up Home the last few months, there’s always a gazillion MB of updates to slog through, before finally arriving in the usual boring environment that adds nothing to the PS3.

Aside from pushing ads in front of us, I really don’t see the point of it all, and hope Sony isn’t diverting too many technical resources away from PSN network improvement for this thing.